I work for a company who is wanting to provide email accounts for about 300 users. There doesn't need to be any bells or whistles, only the ability to send and receive email. In fact, there probably won't be an enormous amount of activity on the accounts, though it could grow in time.
I'm a newbie at this and am unaware of all the available options. My first thought was to consider web hosting.
It seems like there are a hundred companies out there offering unlimited mailboxes for shared web hosting accounts. After some investigation, I saw that alot of these companies limit the sent emails to 250 an hour. This seems too low for comfort.
I started looking at VPS and Dedicated Servers and they seem to be a little more reasonable. Most of these hosting companies offered some type of squirrel mail or imp client, which would work fine.
Am I heading down the right track using a VPS or Dedicated Server at a company like inmotion? Did I misunderstand the 250 per hour limit? Could a shared hosting plan work comfortably for 300 active email accounts?
I've heard Exchange and Google Apps are popular, but after a cursory glance, they seem quite expensive for our needs (but maybe someone can explain why they are worth a closer look).
I'm looking for quality hosting at the right price for a small business. I have been searching these forums, but just got no conclusion, and would appreciate any advice concerning 'features' and 'providers' that I shall look at or avoid.
My needs are:
- very reliable email, with IMAP, good spam filtering, and ability to handle Challenge Response type system;
- rSync and storage of company internal documents (intranet like);
- host a small static website of a small b2b company, with little but valuable traffic;
- handle multiple (non limited) addon domains;
- for the near future: mysql, Ruby on Rails (need to explore it), Python and a good Content Management System;
- good stats tracking tools -- ability to log a list of sessions would be great;
- control panel doesn't matter, ssh would be nice;
- datacenter location doesn't matter too much, connectivity, reliability, and uptime do;
- 5~10GB storage mainly email and internal docs;
- 1GB traffic mainly email;
- preferably with a community forum - I trust more on those who have it, and have nothing to hide;
Do you think I can get something reliable for under $10/month or $100/year ?
I have found these options:
GeekStorage - looks great, LiteSpeed is appealing, people behind it look experienced, I was almost signing for it when I was caught by several issues with long downtimes (over 24h) during the last 2 months;
MediaLayer - also offers LiteSpeed, good comments by many on here, but no listed prices - why hidding the prices? are they trying to screw our bucks? that doesn't sound good to me;
HostGator and LunarPages - very popular, but they don't seem the thing for me, maybe for those with blogs, forums, or GoogleAds oriented websites, I get puzzled how can they offer 600GB for $7.95/month !?
FusedNetwork, Steadfast, DowntownHost and many others - seem to be oriented to lower storage and higher traffic, the opposite of my case.
I know I can get dedicated storage services, but a large amount of my storage need is for email which need to be synchronized through IMAP. BTW, can IMAP be used to synchronize files beyond messages?
I have searched a couple of threads but haven't got exactly, what I was looking for, We are an e-commerce business in UK,
Our website was hosted on shared hosting now we want to move to another good server, the current server is just fine and was provided free by developers,
we are having about 3000 Uniques per day and running oscommerce.
We are looking for UK based company,
Please recommend, what package will be good for us,
VPS, Dedicated server or Shared hosting?
and also please suggest good hosting companies?
I talked to rackspace.com but they are a bit expensive for us,
we are looking to get the same quality with less cost.
I just joined this forum because I want to let as many people as possible know about a horrible experience that I had with my last small business web hosting company: LogicWeb.
Then I would love to hear other people's horror stories about companies they hate and praises about companies they like.
Let me just say that I had originally signed up with another company that was bought by LogicWeb. I had their VPS package and the biggest problem was the customer service which used to be good under the other company. Run into a little problem, send them an email and have to wait three days for a response. A response that generally said something like "we don't cover that."
So, anyhow, I found another small business web hosting company and then tried to cancel with LogicWeb. Sent them email after email and I was still getting billed. Finally, I found their cancellation form buried on their site and submitted a cancellation with a note stating that I had sent several emails trying to cancel.
A couple of weeks later, I get another bill in my email box so I decide to call them up. I'm on the phone with a guy and tell him that I have been trying to cancel for three months and the first thing he says is, "I don't think you're being honest."
"What?" I say not believing that that could be the first thing he says to me. "I think you're lying."
"Well, I'm not lying and I resent this conversation so far."
"Well, you are lying. It's only been two months since you stopped using our system."
"So, because I'm off by one month, you call me a liar?"
"Yes, because liars lie!"
I couldn't believe it! I couldn't believe that any small business web hosting service would call their client a liar even if they were lying. So, I made a mistake and got pissed and cursed!
"I can't believe you're calling me a ****ing liar! I've never ever been called a liar before. Let me speak to your supervisor!"
"Well, I'm the owner and I'm recording this conversation and if you're going to use foul language with me then I'll just report you to my collections department!"
I say, "Let me get this straight. You say that I'm lying and call me a liar, something no business person should ever do to a client, and just because I say '****ing' because I'm insulted, you're pissed at me? Well, if you are going to hang up on me then let me just finish with this... you are a ****ing *******!"
I don't know how much worse a business owner can act with a customer and I highly recommend avoiding LogicWeb since they are the worst small business web hosting around.
Does anyone know of a premium business web host? I'm looking for shared linux hosting, but not from some unreliable "budget" provider. I was considering MediaTemple, but discovered that they aren't very reliable after reading many reviews. Now the only provider left on my list is LiquidWeb. Does anyone else have any good ideas?
- Must be under $40/month (that's a lot for shared hosting) - I don't need that much space or bandwidth (at LEAST 3-5 GB space and 150GB bandwidth) <- Scratch that, at least 60GB bandwidth
It is looking like I am going to have to leave IX hosting. They have a bandwidth problem on my shared server that they cannot seem to solve. I am experiencing slow loading & slow interactive features. Ping times can exceed 500ms during peak hours EST. I have run tracerts that show them specifically that the bottleneck is between thier server and quest-comm and they still cant seem to get a handle on it. This has been going on for a month and I have given them till tuesday.
So, this leaves me to prepare to move my clients' sites UGH! My parameters are somewhat unique which makes it a little tougher to pick a new host. My clients sites are all small local business sites ranging from 5 to 60 pages. I need very little storage space and I use very little bandwidth. However, I do need unlimited domains, ASP support and I really like IX's web shell feature. I will also be doing some e-commerce in the near futures.
I am spending a paltry 7.95 per month with IX. I may spend as much as $20 per month for the right service. Beyond my afformentioned specific requirments, I want a host that is established, proven reliable, in the states, has their own real bricks and mortar facility and a stellar reputation with the experienced web guys.
I have contacted a few that I have seen mentioned here but many dont support ASP and many require a dedicated server deal to host unlimited domains, which of course, is outside my cost requirements.
Does anyone know whatever happened to Classic Hosting? Their domain (classichosting.com) expired a week ago. I have a client who recently bought a domain there for 10 years but the whois shows only 1 year, and the whois says it's registered to Classic themselves. Classic did this with at least 1 other customer I know of, and it was quite a struggle to get them to add the other paid-for 9 years of registration onto the domain. They never did give that customer access to their own domain registration to take possession of and modify contact info, etc. From everything I've seen, Classic had a long history of registering all domains in their (Classic's) own name. If I understand correctly, the Registrant of a domain is the legal owner. So as Registrant of all those domains, Classic legally "owns" all the domains they registered for their customers?
I'm assuming they finally got hoisted by their own petard, but if so this will be even worse for the poor folks that got ripped off.
I am going to start my own company and looking to include HOSTING business with my other services. I tried a lot to surf online to find best hosting plan. But i am confused abt taking better one for me.
My company will not be that big. It will be a starting business and can be say small business. Thats why can u please give me some tips and guideline about taking the right hosting plan? i need both php and asp support with all database and aditional scripts.
I've been poking around here for a few evenings trying to find someone else who's asked just the same question I need to ask, but I'm not really seeing it.
My situation is this. I am writing a website in ASP.Net 2.0 for a small business. I do web development for a living, so the database admin, asp/vb.net coding is not an issue. However, I've never dealt with the hosting side of things.
I need the following:
1) ability to host two different domains using some shared DLLs that provide funtionality used by both sites. I've read that some hosting companies won't let you put DLLs on their servers, so I'm not sure if I can do this.
2) Ability to send and recieve e-mails at "mydomain.com". I think this is a no-brainer.
3) Ability to use SQL Server express.
4) We will be taking orders with credit card numbers, so I need to be able to do HTTPS and I need to know my data will be secure.
5) obviously, I need a server that has the .Net 2.0 framework on it.
I am developing a website for a client, whose web host is BT Business Broadband. I had noticed that the FTP connection to their server was a but slow, and the http connection was not as fast as my reseller account here. I also noticed something else funny....
I have simple PHP script that greets users according to the time of day. It was saying Good Morning, when it is the afternoon. To test, I uploaded another script to output the current time of the server. It was 5 hours out!
I contacted BT to ask them why the time was wrong, and they said that it's because the server is not located in the UK, the company that manages the server is located in Canada!
Frankly I am dissapointed with BT and feel slightly ripped off on behalf of the client.
They pay them enough money to expect a fast service, and to have the server located in the same country, let alone the same continent! This also will affect their search engine results, as it is hosted on a foreign IP address.
I'm managing our business websites and we're presently using budget shared web hosting.
As the business grows, the uptime of our websites (and web server) is important to the bosses.
I'm wondering whether we should go with managed dedicated web hosting (expensive), VPS hosting (not too familiar with it) or go with a reseller hosting account?
I've officially decided to go with Hostgator but I'm having a hard time choosing which type of plan would make the most sense for; maybe there is something I'm not seeing and I'm hoping to get some additional insight...
Here is my plan; I plan on hosting multiple domains (business and personal) and atleast one e commerce website to start and it will eventually grow into about 5 down the road (this is going to be a drawn out process and I want to do it right).
The problem I have is I realize in order to get a true ecommerce website up in running I will need a dedicated IP address and SSL certificate for each site. If I purchase the Business plan it only comes with one dedicated IP and one SSL cert; Hostgator also told me that I'm unable to add an additional dedicated IP address or SSL cert to the business plan so I would have to purchase an additional Business Plan (12.95) per each site. It sounds like I could still host private and not SSL required sites on the business plan and as much domains as I want.
If I go the reseller path then the cost per month will be twice as much as the Business Plan and there is no dedicated IP address included. I will also have to purchase dedicated IP addresses at 2.00 a month and SSL certs as well so that method could get expensive.
I'm also not sure if the baby plan would suffice as well, but apparently not because there is a limit of 1 dedicated IP per plan
What would you guys recommend I do; I want a plan that will allow me to grow with them.
Just curious on what your guys thoughts were..
Also I read a previous post in this forum that someone said their SSL cert prompted the end-user to install the certificate; Being in Ecommerce this is obviously unacceptable to me.
Can I use this edition for hosting on dedicated server, and how does it compare to the enterprise edition ? Can it be used with hosting? The web edition sucks as I can not install ms sql on it, so it is useless. Anyone use sbs server to host his website, because most of the link i read never mention it for hosting, and only for print sharing/ filesharing/ business applications, but where is it's use for hosting?
So what do you think ? IO looked at its infor and it did not provide much?
The company I currently work for relies on our email quite a bit. We currently host our email through the same company that hosts our website, which as we all know, is common practise. However, we've found that our web host's mail servers are being blocked by a few big name spam filters (we're on a shared host, it was someone else on the box that caused the problem we're told), which means that a few of our clients and suppliers can't get email to us properly.
Our shop is cross platform Windows and Mac, and we have people who use a lot of different email clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, etc). I was wondering if anyone knows a good email host. We're looking for a place with no (or very high) limit on emails sent and received a day, a host that has a good control panel for managing mail, and takes a proactive approach to monitoring and removing their servers from spam filters. Our management also wants 24/7 live support, or I would've gone with Google Apps.
I am setting up a small site for my brother's wife and I am looking for a ASP.Net webhost + Email.
1st off does anyone know if Network Solutions offers ASP.Net 2.0 webhosting? He was looking at using them so I have to consider this.
2nd Question. His wife has a palm smartphone that has POP mail. What would you suggest doing so that she can get her email on a laptop and phone. Email forwarding? Do most hosts provide a service like this.
Any other good large hosting companies that you can recommend?
for the past couple of years NearlyFreeSpeech.NET's "pay as you go" hosting system has been good to me, but I've decided I want to host email on my domains without using privacyware like Google. Unfortunately, NearlyFreeSpeech does not support email hosting.
I found a number of hosts, and it seems like MailSnare or FastMail is a good choice.
Perhaps MailTrust also, but their 100% uptime guarantee seems dodgy... any input on that?
The alternative is I drop NearlyFreeSpeech and switch to a host like 1&1 for $4/mo. Can you suggest any other cheapie legitimate hosts along those lines? And would you suggest switching hosts or paying out to a dedicated mail host as mentioned above?
I have created 4 websites for a client, 3 of them are new and one is to replace and existing website. The 4 websites use a single database and content management system and the 3 new ones are hosted by my normal web host.
The existing website is hosted by a different host and I was going to simple change the Nameservers to my normal host so that they are all on the same server. However, my client is quite concerned about the effect that this will have on his email. He has mobile email and remote outlook and I think some security guarantees from this current host (which is BT).
Does anyone know if it possible to change the Nameservers for the website but have the emails still running though the original host (BT)?
I am looking for a good hosting solution for a client of ours. Requirements are quite simple. Need direction really on who to go for.
We need:35 mailboxes Dedicated new IP address OK with POP3 service, no MS exchange hosting needed. Can work with Linux hosting as well. 50MB per mailbox space
What we plan to do is create an MX record for the domain and point it to the provider. That would in turn point to the IP where all the mailboxes reside. The web hosting is already taken care of at a company called Host Depot based in Florida.
Its that simple. I am having trouble looking for a good, trustworthy and reliable provider for this.
Rackspace came back to us qouting $2.80 per mailbox per month but no dedicated IP. Also considered Enom but they are qouting $9.95 per mailbox.
Looking forward to your recommendations. Any questions?
I have watched the screencast on domains etc and I sort of get it, but I have a website for a client that already has email and a server and things but I have to transfer it. basicly the site is hosted on the old developers server and the email is on one of my clients just as an email host(eclipse). so I need to make the domain point to a new server and the email to point from that sever to eclipse without any disruption to the website and especially the email. because I can't afford to make any mistake on this I am asking for the best way to do this.
Do I just change the records on the domain(123reg) and the new server so that it all points to the new server then find the email records(MX or A, can't remember) and get the email server pointing to there after? where do I find these records? and will it cause disruption to the email because of routers and stuff updating as said in the screecast or is that just for new domains?
I want to send bulk emails. I need a webhosting that can send 1 million emails in one go. It should have a static IP and should be cost effective. I have low budget.
I would like to help my friend to host his email service on my VPS server. His current shared web hosting unfortunately has a quota limit on the number of emails he can send each hour, which is very inconvenient for him.
I know how to modify the MX record of my friend's domain in his current web host using Cpanel, but I don't know how to set up my server to accommodate his email service. I'd appreciate if anyone can teach me how to do it. My server also has Cpanel/WHM installed.
I have a few servers that host my sites, but managing the mail servers has been a pain. The configuration files are arcane and sometimes I just can't figure out why a mail doesn't show up for half an hour or more.
I looked at FuseMail but read recent reviews of them having delayed delivery and account throttling issues... so I ruled that out.
MailTrust looks clean so far, and I can do $30 per month for 10 mailboxes.
I am making a disposable email service website as a side project right now. I am looking for a good hosting provider right now to get this started off. Any suggestions? Anyone do this before and tell me who the good ones to use are? Any companies to definitely not use?
I represent a small company ~10 users, that has a domain name registered with a company like godaddy. The domain is not hosted as yet.
I would like to find a good service provider that can provide us with email hosting, i.e. we would like to get 5 email accounts with 5GB or more, larger the better.
The users will be accessing the email through Outlook and if possible through webmail.
Over time, we would like to host the website and build a site as well but that is not an immediate need
Finally, the hosting company should have good customer service.
